5 Years Later, Rana Plaza is EVERYWHERE!

Posted on Mon, 04/23/2018 - 6:01pm

[español abajo]

Today marks the 5th anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse, which occurred in Bangladesh on April 24, 2013. On that day, 1,127 textile industry workers died and more than 2,500 people were wounded. The majority of the victims were women, many of whom ended up unable to work again. It is, to this day, the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry worldwide.

This horrific event exemplifies the intersections of systems of oppression that we are fighting against: neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy. These systems oppress women and people of color globally and exacerbate climate change. Workers from the US and around the globe fight for better working conditions and salaries. Women, especially from the global south, face some of the worst working conditions. The victims of the Rana Plaza building collapse were were exposed to subhuman working conditions and exploited by the corporations that did business there, including Walmart, The Children's Place, North Face, Benetton, Mango and Zara.

As we continue our Earth Day celebrations this week, it is important to remember that the fashion industry is one of the largest polluting industries and a huge contributor to the climate crisis. It is also an industry that exploits labor largely from the global south, and largely a workforce of women.

As the US chapter of the global feminist action movement, the World March of Women, we share this statement denouncing the neoliberal policies that value profit over people and the planet, which led to this disaster...

"As 24th April comes around again, we, the women of the World March of Women, reaffirm our struggle, condemning the patriarchal capitalist system which preserves and perpetuates inequality due to the sexual division of labor, subjecting women to reproductive work while simultaneously rendering this work invisible and discrediting it within a broad economic sphere. Reproductive and care work is what generates, reproduces and sustains the life which maintains all other social and human dynamics. And yet, the capitalist, patriarchal system appropriates the labor power of women, and, in many circumstances, manipulates and commodifies this work for its own financial benefit...

For this reason, we, the World March of Women, will mobilize on 24th April 2018 to reaffirm our fight to defend the systems which sustain life and to call for our work to be valued as a central part of the economy and of all systems ensuring the sustainability of life. We champion the values of coexistence and solidarity among women, between men and women, and between human beings and nature." Read the full statement HERE.

We Will Keep Marching Until We Are All Free: Defending the Dignity of Our Bodies, Our Communities, and Mother Earth.